Tonight
the fog a blanket
dense
forgetful
descended
upon my breath
a misty cloud escaping
to join the layer of mystery
around the blue gold halos of
streetlamps
my fingers inside my pocket
blind moles
away from the cold
the fog a blanket
dense
forgetful
descended
upon my breath
a misty cloud escaping
to join the layer of mystery
around the blue gold halos of
streetlamps
my fingers inside my pocket
blind moles
away from the cold
The void unfulfiled:
Being back in school is great. I love learning, studying having others to challenge me intellectually, but sometimes I get to this point when i ask myself how much concept is too much. I don't know. Theory is great. I like learning about ways to look at things. Theories as frameworks to look at the world,as ways to ask questions about the world, poke at assumptions, then watch them fall apart. The only problem is I think theories have this wonderful way of raising questions so badly needed, but the same time it also fails magnificently at giving anything back to unify the things they fragment and break apart. I'm tired of concepts like that. Tired. Just sick of how wonderful they seem at first, a whole new way of looking at things by way of discrediting the general unassuming position we always unquestioningly adopt. But then what? If it cannot be translated into something I can call my own and become integrated into the way I live from day to day, my understanding of the world. Then it is only as good as subjects for discussion only on paper in the sealed off academic world.
This seems to be the general condition of our world today. This breaking apart, fragmentation into little specific areas. People really sneer at the possibility of a polymath now--Jack of all trade but master of none is a fear in the professional world. We all somehow ache to succeed in this little niche of ours, grow blindly and exponentially in one area. I always picture a really thin man with an overdeveloped left arm. Or a wimpish woman with a giganticly muscular toe. No one really believes in learning just for the sake of wanting to find out, really. It is suppose to serve some kind of purpose take us somewhere. Every time I talk to someone and tell them I'm in school, they almost always have a reflex question waiting. Then What? What is your major? Where is it supposed to take you? (unspoken but always hanging on the tip of their tongue, at the edge of their mind)
Philosophies which suggest the possibility of a unified life, a unified being are always called into question. Because skepticism is the historical/intellectual baggage our generation has inherited. that's why religion is suffering so much for its promise of a unified way of living, it promise of a single way of thought,way of life which transcends our mortality. Intellectuals or even just plain skeptics steer clear of it. What will we give up to keep our questions, to hang on to the theories and the questions embedded within.
I don't know if it is just something I have been feeling. BUt lately, I feel that I too have been conned. Because theories just like religion are ideologies we adopt which will ultimately still close up our openness to experience. I left church when I felt that it restricted me from living freely. When my questions could no longer be given air to breathe and grow and I could not experience life more fully, I said goodbye to organized religion. (not religion itself)
BUt the thing is, we can never really be free, can we? The notion that we can slip out of a chute-like container of thoughts by way of question and theories is an illusion. It is all about choosing something else to put in place of what we discredit. Whereever you choose to stand, you would still have to make a choice(a stand) at the end. And the promise that theories quite unconsciously gives, is that we can really choose to not make a stand. By claiming that everything is perspective, unspoken is the idea that we can change and adop different perspectives. But really, when we are not thinking about it, not reading about it, not writing about it. When it comes to those real moments in our lives, where do these perspective stand?
I said no to the promise of religion or even religious philosophy. I thought: ANything that claims it can explain everything surely cannot explain much. But now, theory is getting to this point when it too explains too little. By going so deep in a tiny little concentrated area, it always leaves out too much to be meaningful to me. I don't know what I'm going to do now. I can't go back into the embrace of religion, because it has proved itself too stifling intellectually. But I don't want to go the way of theories either, but it is too suffocating for my emotions and my spirituality.
Is this the disease of our generation then? To have our lives cut into little segments? That we must be so many verions of ourselves? OUrselves as lover, as a worker, as a worshipper, as a thinker, as a sister, as a daugther, as a woman, as a man.(the endless list) To always be conscious of differences.Must I go to church on Sunday to be faithful and return to school on Monday to attaack the very same thing I embraced on Sunday? How do we not become hypocrites, but instead a fuller person? The idea of identity as performance is cool until we realize it is already a fact, no longer theory. That is the scary thing, to think that the theories which are supposed to help us question quite unknowingly become our way of life and accepted as blindly as the assumptions they are supposed to challenge.
Maybe the last frontier of our lives is plain pleasure. The only thing religion and theory cannot get at as yet. The only thing we embrace. The only defense against the horrid intellectualization and theorizing of everything. But then again, how much of a pleasure can we derive from something that is purely sensual if it is not tied to something intellectual and spiritual.
oh God! we need something to unify our lives so badly whether we know this or not. What would happen to a society when questions are all that exist, and on the other hand are shallow answers that won't even convince kids now adays. We are all forced to pick one side or the other. Be a follower and leave questions aside, or be a skeptic and be tormented by the questions. I need to find a middle ground. Because I want to live more freely. I want to live more fully. God can't help me in this, nor can the philosophers and thinkers. Beauty and music may help to ease the torture, but really, it is giong back into how fragmented everything has become. That we have to shut up sides of ourselves in containers all the time. Like this short story I read recently. There is always an invisible tiger in one of the rooms in the house at a certain time. So one room must always be isolated. I want to kill that bloody tiger instead of building more rooms!
Sim! you have to watch this. It's like budak Pantai-Queer version...
It's the most moving song I've heard in a long while
Drag-apella
Click here
At 24--the numbers talked
discussed among themselves their importance
their patterns
and the destiny they will play out in our lives
they will outnumber each other
out rank the others
with their small talks about the political big things
and big discussion of the personal small
MIstakes will be calculated while
regrets make good souvenirs
Passages marked out for another day
never read
Toothbrushes worn scraggy and thin
shoes not outgrown but betrayed by daily love
they will be significant to these numbers
They will neglect the mathematicians
break their hearts
while they burn philosophers with their own jokes
Spirituality to them
are but just that, nothing more. Or less
Freedom not a condition,
it finally reveals its conditional nakedness and helplessness
So the numbers talk
their chatters never a song tuneless
even to the tonedeaf monotone kid in choir
and it is just so
Tune out. Block them with a muffler
Turn on your music louder
for they are but the doors
we go in and out of
never aware that they cut up spaces
opening and closing the infinite, the concise, the specific and the concrete
wide expanses and narrow confines
even the eye, the nose, and Grandmaster vision himself
thanks the clear glass through which it burns images
onto those numbers
while we try foolishly to attain their immortality